Akron AAUP Protecting Academic Freedom For a Free Society
The University of Akron Chapter |
American Association of University Professors

Here’s an opinion from the online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education on a new bill in California that would allow students to enroll in MOOC’s for credit.  The author, Mr. Rob Jenkins, gives his reasoning for declaring acceptance of MOOC credit to be a “massively bad idea.”
From the piece: “…California’s plan (or to be fair, one senator’s plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state’s least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format.
Here’s a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into “retention” efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that’s another blog post.)”
Read the entire article on The Chronicle’s website here.

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